The volume of information communicated over a network, such as the Internet, continues to grow. Data, images, and the like, are likely to remain the largest percentage of Internet traffic. Often, the issues of concern with Internet traffic range from business to consumer response and order times, to the time required to deliver business information to a traveler using a wireless device, to the time it takes to download rich media content such as music, videos, and so forth. Thus, it is not surprising, that a major compliant among Internet users is a lack of speed. One solution that is often proposed is to compress the data before it is sent over the network.
Compression is a process of seeking to encode information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation might use through the use of various compression algorithms. By compressing the data less data may be sent over the network, which may thereby reduce network bandwidth delays.
A number of compression algorithms are available today. For example, the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression methods are a set of well-known compression algorithms. DEFLATE is a variation on LZ, and is used in the PKZIP, gzip, and PNG compression algorithms. Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW), LZ-Renau (LZR) Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO), and BZIP2 are other known compression algorithms. There exist many other compression algorithms as well.
While use of a compression algorithm may reduce the amount of data that is sent over a network, the compression algorithm may also consume computer resources that may in turn delay the sending of the data over the network. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.